Almost a decade after a battle that pitted preservationists against downtown business owners ended in the demolition of Lawrence Halprin’s Skyline Park, some experts now use the loss as a cautionary tale about endangered public landscapes.

It’s all in the eye of the beholder. The only real point of agreement is that both sides considered the original Skyline Park as sculpture.

Preservationists argue that the architect’s legacy has continued to appreciate. In 2010, Park Central Square in Springfield, Mo., became the first work by Halprin — a National Medal of the Arts winner — to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, followed by Heritage Park Plaza in Fort Worth, Texas.

What doomed Halprin’s Skyline Park in Denver is the same thing that endangers similar cultural landscapes everywhere: neglect, lack of maintenance that resulted in broken surfaces, bad lighting and overgrown vegetation.

All of that made Skyline Park a magnet for drug use, vagrants and skateboarders.

Worse, it was a ’70s park in a sparkling new millennium.

“It felt to people like a shag carpet,” Komara said. “A bit out of date.”

In 1970, when urban renewal was sweeping the nation, the Denver Urban Renewal Authority selected Halprin to design a linear park for downtown.

He gave it a strong sense of place. A key concept was the arroyos of the Rocky Mountain foothills, with fountains that spouted refreshing microclimates. Color reflected the red sandstone of Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Walkways of red brick, made from local clay, were patterned after American Indian beadwork patterns. Trees gave dappled shade. It was like a 100-foot-wide canyon in the city — and for the Downtown Denver Partnership, that was part of the problem.

“It was a sculpture like a mountain canyon,” which made it difficult to use for events, said John Desmond, executive vice president of downtown environment at the Downtown Denver Partnership.

It was also expensive to maintain, he said, with a “lot of stair-stepping walls with strips of grass that were hard to mow.”

The redesign, officially unveiled in 2004, is much more “event-friendly,” he said. Each year, about 35 to 50 events are held in Skyline Park, including an ice-skating rink that last winter broke attendance records with 30,000 people.

“We’re very happy with the changes,” Desmond said. “The successful bellwether for a park is how many people are using it. It’s not how it looks but how it functions.”

Two weeks before the original Skyline Park was demolished, the Colorado State Historical Fund gave a grant for emergency documentation, which made it the first landscape in Colorado — and the first modernist landscape in the United States — to be accepted for the Historic American Landscapes Survey. Komara was in charge of the project.

“It was a piece of art,” she said of the original park. “My biggest concern is that there will be another example of something like it in the city that is threatened.”

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